Photo courtesy of maggiejumps via Flickr

It’s sometimes brought up as a harsh truth for public relations and marketing professionals: social media “doesn’t scale.” If you monitor blogs and social sites for mentions of your brand, the more comments you notice, the more time and effort it takes to respond to them in a timely fashion.

Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang last week told an audience at South by Southwest Interactive, “you can never hire enough community managers” to respond to mentions of your brand quickly enough.

For large consumer brands attracting thousands or even tens of thousands of mentions on blogs and social sites each day, this is true. For small and mid-size companies, perhaps less so. But regardless of the volume of coverage an individual product or topic attracts, an important aspect is often overlooked in this conversation: our ability to identify the most influential mentions, and respond to them quickly.  

Let’s assume you’re the lone community manager or media relations professional at a company whose products attract about 1,000 mentions on the social Web each day. Crafting 1,000 thoughtful, helpful responses per day is not feasible, and let’s assume that in today’s economic climate, recruiting a counterpart (or 10 counterparts) isn’t either. Your best approach is to use social metrics such as inbound links, comments and votes to determine which mentions are most likely to spread by word of mouth and attain the greatest mindshare. Premium social media monitoring solutions such as the Cision Social Media Dashboard can be indispensable in this regard. After you’ve identified the most visible mentions, you can focus your efforts on them, and you’re off to a great start.

We’ve often discussed the importance of measuring influence online in the context of proving return on investment for your blogger outreach and marketing efforts. But these measures can be equally valuable in helping allocate your time to the most influential posts.

Ever wonder how a large broadcast network navigates the rapidly evolving media landscape? Want to know best practices as a PR person for working with CNN? Now you have an opportunity to address the CNN South by Southwest team directly through a special edition of #journchat:

Beginning at 8:30p ET tonight, March 15th, 2010, #journchat founder Sarah Evans is hosting a special edition of #journchat live and will interview a panel of leaders from CNN regarding emerging trends and best practices that connect the public relations, journalism and blogging communities. The live panel will take place in Austin, TX, in conjunction with the 2010 SXSW Interactive Conference.

Confirmed participants include:

• Doug Gross, tech reporter, CNN.com
• Lila King, senior producer for iReport and user participation, CNN.com
• Jen Martin, senior director of PR, new media and digital networks, CNN Worldwide
• Chris Peacock, executive editor and vice president, CNNMoney.com
• Ainsley TeGrotenhuis, director of digital marketing, CNN
• Dermot Waters, senior director of product development, CNN.com
• Alex Wellen, senior executive producer of integrated programming, CNN U.S.

The live show will be available for viewing via Evans’ Ustream account at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/prsarahevans; and those users will have the opportunity to interact directly with the moderator and pose possible questions to the panelists. Additionally, online users can continue the dialogue on Twitter by following the #journchat hashtag. I recommend using Tweetchat.com – it’s the easiest way I’ve found to follow the conversation.

#journchat is an ongoing conversation between journalists, bloggers and PR people that usually happens on Twitter every Monday evening. Typically, more than 200 participants send questions to the moderator (@journchat) or respond to others’ comments during each conversation. Since its debut on November 24, 2008, #journchat has garnered more than 6,400 followers.

On a side note, if you haven’t heard, Cision recently announced an agreement to work with Sarah Evans and #journchat to help continue a frank and open exchange of ideas about improving communication among PR and the media.

I’ll be there tonight tweeting – hope to see you there!

Photo courtesy of Jon Hanson via Flickr

 For a while now, I’ve been writing about how public relations professionals can use social metrics such as links, comments and votes on social news sites to determine which blogs and sites represent the most influential voices on a particular topic. 

It’s easy to get mired in the muck of all these numbers. So Cision Media Research Director Valerie Lopez and I will use a metaphor to illustrate how these metrics relate to each other in a free webinar on social media measurement next Tuesday, March 16 at 1 p.m. CST.  

Coral reefs provide us with a model for understanding how influence flows through the social Web.

• The exoskeleton provides nutrients (links, comments, votes) to each of the plants (blogs and sites).
• As readers, bloggers and conversationalists, we are the schools of fish, pointing each other toward pockets of tasty sea plants (interesting content).
• Big social sites like Twitter and Facebook are the ocean currents, spreading information quickly like warm water that enriches the whole environment.
• Like coral reefs surrounded by deep, dark ocean, the Social Web appears in pockets surrounded by vast expanses of lifeless, dormant sites (“The Static Web”).
• To measure and understand the influence of a message, you have to look at the whole system.

We hope you can join us on Tuesday.

Vanessa: When commenting on blogs, how do you approach building the relationship from a personal level, while still representing your company?

Val: Transparency is key! I’m sure you’ve heard that before. Bloggers and their readers do not want to feel duped so it’s important you identify yourself as a representative of a brand from the get go. And like any relationship, it takes time. Get to know a blogger by becoming regular reader of his or her blog. Leave substantive, thoughtful comments. Posting “great article” does not a relationship make. Engage with the blogger and other commenters. It’s all about adding to the conversation and not just pushing your own content. We always recommend the rule of thirds: have a third of it be about you and your brand, have another third be about promoting others and have another third be regular conversation.

Mike: When pitching traditional media journalist, if they run story in print or on broadcast, how do we in turn get them to blog about it, or can we?

Andrea: More than ever, coverage is crisscrossing several mediums. Many journalists say stories can start with a blog post and then blossom into a longer-form broadcast or print story — and vice versa. As always, it’s never a good idea to pressure someone into writing a blog post or story. If the pitch is appropriate and relevant, the journalist will find the best way to cover it and it’s your job to make sure they have all the resources and information they need.

Andrew: I am utilizing Facebook as a media. What are your views on MySpace? Is there an advantage to talking to the MySpace crowd? Who is the MySpace crowd (how are they different from Facebook)?

Val: The MySpace crowd is hugely popular with musicians and entertainers. It’s a great place for them to showcase their work and share news with fans. Many people in the entertainment industry utilize MySpace to promote movies, songs, comedy, art, etc. I find that MySpace is great for promoting while Facebook is great for cultivating relationships.

Jaclyn:  With small, local media, where every reporter covers lots of beats, what’s the best way to pitch individual reporters?

Andrea: With cutbacks, staff reductions and the pressure to produce more stories, journalists are taking on more beats and are responsible for wearing many hats. The best way to pitch an individual reporter is to acknowledge his or her status as a “jack of all trades.” It is appropriate to mention that you’re aware of their multiple beats and responsibilities, but specifically mention why your pitch is unique and relevant for a particular area. Even though journalists are covering more topics, it doesn’t mean they’ll ignore a relevant pitch when it comes their way.

Jessica: You said not to follow up via phone, are there any exceptions?

Andrea: There are exceptions to every rule and the best way to shortcut this problem is to ask the journalist if they mind follow-up phone calls. In my experience, most journalists are too busy for follow-up phone calls and an e-mail seems more appropriate. However, it’s very possible you’ll come across a journalist who prefers a quick phone call. If you’ve developed a relationship with a journalist, feel free to ask questions aimed at making his or her job easier. If it means following up via phone, dial away!

To get in touch with Val, please contact valerie dot lopez at Cision dot com.

In many of Cision’s free social media webinars, we frequently receive questions about how to get more followers on Twitter, Facebook and other top social networks. My answer usually consists of two parts:

1. Quality vs. Quantity: It’s not just a numbers game on these sites. There are lots of get-rich-quick tricks to getting a lot of followers – but if they aren’t loyal followers, they will not be inclined to take action or act as a brand ambassador. Building quality relationships with a smaller community will get you much further in the new world of building social capital.
2. Authentic Involvement. Act as a member of the community by actually having conversations with friends and fans, sharing helpful ideas, links and stories and answering and asking questions as they arise. Comment on influential bloggers’ posts in your industry, create a list of your favorite Tweeters or create something of value within your social network for friends and fans to take advantage of. These actions will build your social capital and you will watch your community grow.

These are definitely best practices, but, in reality, does a larger number of followers ever produce better results solely because of sheer size? Well, we may soon know the answer.

The behemoth machine that is American Idol has always kept a pretty tight reign on the messaging coming from its contestants. In past years, contestants were not allowed to maintain public profile pages on the top social networks – this year, Fox gave each semi-finalist a controlled MySpace, Facebook and Twitter profile, according to Reality Blurred.

The TV Addict has aggregated how many followers each semi-finalist has – and it’s a wide spectrum.  Andrew Garcia, the leader by almost 10,000 followers, has over 21,000 followers on the three combined sites, while the least popular semi-finalist, Michelle Delamor, has only 2,363 combined followers. (It should be noted that Lee Dewyze has had the largest growth in his following in the past week, adding 193%.)

But how loyal are these followers? Will a social follow result in an action – a vote for the contestant? Will tracking these numbers provide us with a crystal ball to predict who will stay and go on the show based on number of followers? Only time will tell. But it may provide us with some interesting insight when we begin to look at the most engaged communities as the season progresses. I’ll keep an eye out and keep you posted.

Skincare/summer health stories: Yes, it might be torturous to think about the summer months when it’s still February but magazines are prepping summer beauty coverage around this time of year. This means pitching skincare products like lotions, sunscreen and make-up should have a summertime angle. It might still be 25 degrees and snowy, but editors are looking to fill their beauty pages with information for when it’s 80 degrees and sunny.

Sports-related tie-ins and pitches: The World Cup is this summer as well as perennial events like the NBA Finals and Major League Baseball. If you are debuting a product, tracking an industry trend or have access to an expert, make sure to relate your pitch to these events and make sure to pitch now. Even though these events are months away, editors are getting themselves ready for an influx of coverage come the summer months.

Cooking/barbequing stories: My mouth is watering just thinking about some of the upcoming topics slated for coverage: meat marinades, fish dishes and the best beer to drink with a burger. Many magazines are readying their coverage for summer eating. Although it may be a painful reminder that July is still months away, make sure to pitch stories related to July Fourth barbequing and festivities around this time.

Green topics not stale: Over the past few years, green and eco-friendly topics have become year-round presences in magazine coverage. Across the board, whether it’s a high-end fashion magazine or a trade woodworking magazine, green topics are of interest to editors. Word of warning: don’t “greenwash”your pitch by trying to paint something as eco-friendly when in reality, it isn’t. By all means, if your product or pitch has a legitimate green angle, play that up, but be honest.

Photo courtesy of D'Arcy Norman via Flickr

 Often, people ask us what it takes to make something “go viral”. Some social media strategists will tell you that online virality, where thousands or millions of people are discussing and linking to a blog post or video at once, is too high a goal for PR and marketing professionals to attain. When the volume of conversations around a topic or event spikes into the stratosphere online, that’s an organic phenomenon that cannot be engineered, they say. 

Nonetheless, achieving mass exposure for a brand or product remains the goal of many professional communicators. The ability to position a campaign to spread by word of mouth is an important skill, and yet for most of us it seems elusive. Perhaps thinking about the role of conflict in storytelling is a good place to start.   

That conflict is compelling often is seen as a challenge for PR pros. Sometimes we feel that telling positive stories about our brands is made more difficult because some people are more interested in bad news than good news. For example, ESPN commentator Tony Kornheiser’s recent comments about colleague Hannah Storm’s attire is a more popular topic on Google Trends than free food. 

Both IHOP and Jack in the Box are offering free meals today as a promotional technique, and people are searching for and tweeting information about these promotions in large numbers today. But not as large as the numbers of people who are searching for Tony Kornheiser. 

Free food, beneficial and appealing though it is, has no element of conflict. People get excited about it, but not as excited as we get about controversy. 

Many PR and marketing pros use conflict to their advantage. PR strategist Geri Denterlein helped turn a massive IT meltdown at a Boston-area hospital into a story about the perserverance and dedication of the hospital staff. 

Writing in Inc. magazine a couple of years ago, she said: “Businesses that are willing to acknowledge adversity can reap enormous PR rewards.” 

Something to keep in mind as we seek that elusive “viral” quality.

Photo courtesy of jbaker5 via Flickr

In the week since Google announced its newest social Web tool, Google Buzz, bloggers have been doing what bloggers do when a new tool arrives: expressing their excitement, exposing its flaws, debating its significance and impact on competitors, and so forth.

Using the Cision Social Media Dashboard, I analyzed about 200,000 blog posts, tweets, forum posts, videos and other social messages online discussing the launch of Google Buzz, which integrates new social features into Gmail. Below are the 10 most influential blog posts based on a formula which weighs three factors in decreasing order of importance: comment count, inbound links and votes on social bookmarking sites like Digg. (I chose to employ that specific formula but there is plenty of flexibility in the Dashboard regarding how you choose to weigh influence.)

I noticed that in conversations about Google Buzz on the whole, positive comments outnumbered negative ones more than 7 to 1. Generally, people seem pretty excited about the opportunity to work with content from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and elsewhere in the same place where they send and receive email. In the top 10 posts below, however, you’ll notice a higher proportion of skepticism and negativity.

Five of the 10 most influential posts about Google Buzz focus on a privacy flaw in the initial release (which Google later corrected) which caused some personal contact information to be published unwittingly.

A rule of thumb about influence in news coverage and conversations is at play here: flaws and conflict are more compelling than enthusiasm. Just about every time I slice and dice data on a topic like this, I find a higher proportion of critical commentary in the most influential posts. That’s something for PR professionals to keep in mind generally: for every highly visible criticism, often messages of enthusiasm await further down the list.

1. Silicon Alley Insider: WARNING: Google Buzz Has a Huge Privacy Flaw
2. Engadget: Google Buzz take mobile location services to the next level
3. Google Mobile Blog: Introducing Google Buzz for mobile: See buzz around you and tag posts with your location
4. Molly Rants (CNET News): Google Buzz: Privacy nightmare
5. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang: Web Strategy Matrix: Google Buzz vs Facebook vs MySpace vs Twitter (Feb 2010)
6. SaveDelete: Google Buzz Privacy: Easy Steps to Stop Google Buzz from Showing the World Your Contacts
7. The Consumerist: Google Buzz Makes Private Contact Info Public
8. Crackberry: Google Buzz Takes Over Gmail Inboxes Everywhere But Brings No BlackBerry Support – Will You Use It?
9. The Technology Liberation Front: Google Buzz is No “Privacy Nightmare” (Unless You’re a Privacy Paternalist)
10. Tremendous News: 5 Reasons Why Google Buzz Will Fail

Photo courtesy of Rennett Stowe via Flickr

Companies that go looking for reasons not to monitor and engage with social media sometimes wind up with what sound more like excuses: rigid cultures, time constraints, organizational siloes, and so forth. But one common objection that is harder to overcome is fairly specific to the healthcare and pharmaceutical space: an uncertain regulatory landscape.  

Despite a lack of direction from regulators, some firms have experimented with social marketing projects online, says Christiane Truelove, editor in chief of R&D Directions and Med Ad News, who covers what companies are doing with healthcare and pharmaceutical promotion in social media. With some tips from Truelove, I’ve been looking at these case studies and present for you 5 of the best I’ve found from the past couple of years.

1. Johnson & Johnson Acuvue’s Acuminder Facebook app. Everybody has that absentminded friend who leaves their contact lenses in for way too long. The Acuminder app reminds you when it’s time to change your contacts. It’s available as an email service outside of Facebook as well. Acuvue’s Facebook page also provides a pretty good example of a brand presence on Facebook that mixes conversation with promotion effectively.
2. GlaxoSmithKline’s myAlli is an oft-cited case study in a company harnessing online communities for market research or insights. We’ve covered it here before. Patients using the Alli weight loss drug share their stories with GSK and each other, recording their successes and difficulties with weight loss.
3. Just goes to show that there’s no single right way to use Facebook: McNeil Pediatrics serves up ADHD Moms, a Facebook page with more than 9,500 fans. Not a lot of discussion happens on the Wall of this page, but this effort to share useful information with thousands of mothers of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder serves as a useful resource in an accessible place.
4. Pharma company AstraZeneca maintains a YouTube channel that offers a valuable stream of news about the company’s initiatives such as Hope Lodge Centers, which offer free temporary housing facilities near major cancer treatment centers.  
5. Three years ago, Novartis launched a YouTube contest called FluFlix, in which contestants promoted the health benefits of flu vaccines.  The introductory video attracted 800,000 views.

You may notice I’ve gone back several years for some of these examples. More recently, pharma companies have been cautious in social media, awaiting direction from regulators. Leaders in pharmaceutical marketing and advertising discussed some of the regulatory hurdles in a panel discussion at New York University last week.

“There aren’t any firm guidelines from the FDA,” Truelove says. “There are companies that would rather be cautious or safe than be very visible in a social media context and have the FDA come after them later.”

As we’ve discussed here before, Traditionally, pharma companies are required to adhere to FDA guidelines in the realm of “adverse event reporting”. In other words,  if they discover a consumer complaining about the side effects of a drug, even if those side effects are well known to be associated with that drug, they must report the complain to the FDA.

But those guidelines only require that events be reported if the person making the complaint is identifiable; a username like Mustang468724 doesn’t meet that requirement. “Should a company respond to something like that? The general consensus is that they shouldn’t really have to,” Truelove says.

A study by The Nielsen Company found that less than 1 percent of reports of drug side effects found on Yahoo Health boards were required to be reported to the FDA [white paper download].

What do you think? Are pharma companies being too cautious? Or are they better off waiting for direction?

Also be sure to check out Cision Navigator’s new list of the top 10 pharmaceutical magazines.